Making Connections One Brain at a Time

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TalkToMeGuy: Greetings everyone, this is the Sound Health Radio Show where we talk about the crux of the environment, our health and longevity. We're the Richard Talk to Me Guy and Sherry Edwards is off working on the SoundHealthPortal.com. I would suggest going to the SoundHealthPortal.com, scrolling down just a bit and clicking on the Watch How button. And you'll see a short video explaining how to record and submit your first vocal recording.

Then go back to SoundHealthPortal.com, scroll down to the current active campaigns such as these are always rotating so this changes all the time. But could be cellular inflammation, PTSD, TBI, or perhaps neuroflip placestacy. One of my favorites, seeing how the brain is working, what's going on. And choose one that is of interest to you, click on that campaign and click the free voice analysis and the system will walk you through submitting your recording.

You will see back an email with a report back usually in one to two hours. To hear and share replays of the show, 20 to 30 minutes after you hear the outro music, go to TalkToMeGuy.com, scroll down that page and you'll see the show at the top of the episodes page. There are also hundreds of shows available there as well. There's a microphone icon at the bottom right corner of all the show notes.

If you would like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that, Dr. Laurie Hanson DC has held faculty positions at both Palmer College and Life University from 2003 until 2012. Dr. Hanson is recognized domestically and internationally through her personal teachings to healthcare professionals, teachers and parents on the progression of pediatric development.

Deepening her understanding and furthering her credentials, she became a neurodevelopmental therapist and a certified autism specialist, focusing on primitive reflexes and the wiring of the human nervous system. Dr. Hanson also has a match as a sports science with its concentration in nutrition. Dr. Hanson has practiced since 1996 in the area of pediatric development and brain-based patient management.

Dr. Hanson is recognized as a world expert in teaching and caring for children with developmental delay. Dr. Hanson founded Connect My Brain, a state-of-the-art facility offering a non-invasive practice that allows children and adults to reconnect with their brain by leveraging a three-tiered approach focusing on the body, the brain and the fuel that runs it all. Dr. Laura joins us to talk about making connections one brain at a time. Welcome Dr. Laura.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

TalkToMeGuy: I'm going to start by asking you to explain, I put it in the show notes. You have a lot of certifications and degrees behind your name after DC. Could you just give us sort of a rundown of what each one of those things are because it's a lot of them. It's a lot. You're a studying dog. I mean that a great way.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Yes, I am definitely a life learner. Well of course the first one is a doctor of chiropractic and I think because so many people as soon as they hear the word chiropractor they just get one image in their mind and my practice took a direct, a very specific direction very early on with children and so honestly in order to make sure I could do everything that I wanted to do I I got a degree or certificate in all of those arenas so the MS is the master's in sports health science with a concentration in nutrition. QEEG is the diplomat in reading raw QEEG data so that I can provide neuro feedback services for people. The DICCP is a diplomat in chiropractic clinical pediatrics. The NDP is a neurodevelopmental therapist. BCN is board certified in neurofeedback and CAS is certified autism specialist.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow, this is why we're going to do a series of shows. I'm already telling people Dr. Laura and I have talked about we're going to do several shows and you can see why she runs that down. Now how did you make the jump from law to chiropractic and health because I know that you were leaning toward law and then I don't know what happened. Something happened anyway.

Dr. Laura Hanson: No, I never told her forever that I was going to be a lawyer. She just did because you're going to be a lawyer. You're going to be a lawyer. So of course I grew up thinking I was going to be a lawyer and then the day that I got accepted to law school was also the day that I found out that I was pregnant with my son and so I did not want to start law school being pregnant. So I became a paralegal to support my family. My husband at the time was going to be starting chiropractic school so I felt like I needed to go and support us and so I became a paralegal and then I got to really see what goes on in law offices and I won't focus on that but it wasn't something that I wanted to do and spend the rest of my life. So when my husband at the time was getting ready to graduate that's when I left being a paralegal and I took a job over at Life University helping out in the Student Center and I was just around people and I was very physically engaged. I had been an aerobics instructor. I had been a personal trainer. I had even been a competitive bodybuilder and so the physical body really was getting very excited about all the possibilities that I could do by looking at becoming a chiropractor but I had to take all these science courses because you know for pre-law you don't get into organic chemistry and physics so I said okay guys let's you and me make a deal. If I can get through the short courses of all the sciences that I have to finish and I had to do five I said then I'm going to take it as this I'm going in the right direction.

Well I did. I did biology two, organic chemistry one and two and physics one and two over two and a half quarters and I can look back at that time and see instrumental pieces of what I learned that I even apply today. I was very very committed to this process and I would sit up front take notes I'd go home rewrite my notes I would make flash cards then back then it was a cassette tape I would record myself of my notes and then I would work out listening to my voice doing my notes and I was able to really excel but now I know what I was really doing I was laying this in information into so many different parts of my brain that just made it all come together very very easily and I drew posters and people this is such a funny part but people liked my posters and they asked me to make a copy and give it to them I made $5,000 on my study tool I know and back then you know that's nineteen let's see that'd be like 1992 that's pretty good money for on the side and but it it was just something that it got started that way and then I just couldn't stop and obviously I still can't stop.

TalkToMeGuy: I was just about to say that. It doesn't look like you're stopping anytime soon and I've heard or read read you say I can't remember what hearing at this point by the time I've studied I can't remember what I've heard and what I've read so it's a blur but that you always start with a brain map and I'm going to qualify our math is that true of everybody that comes in to see you you start with a reference point of the brain map?

Dr. Laura Hanson: Every single person now I do have little ones I have little cherubs sometimes those can be difficult if the child is very sensitive putting a cap on their head can really create a lot of emotional upsetness but I've also had a two and a half year old that had suffered a brain injury and I could put a cap on his head no problem and run a map and with children the reason I really like to start there is because I'm looking at how their brain has gotten wired up based on their developmental journey where so I'm going to say I look at it from the bottom up where when it comes to an adult and you've been functioning and you are working and you know going after your hopes and dreams I'm looking at your brain from the top down so yes everybody starts with a brain map

TalkToMeGuy: and can you tell us more about what the brain map is showing what is it sure I mean I suspect you see it like somebody would look like I would look at a photograph I'd see a bunch of stuff because I've had a camera in my hand since I was in junior high so I see a lot when I look at the photograph technically and I suspect you look at a brain map and it's like a painting of some sort whereas to me it would be squiggly lines on a page what is the what kind of information are you getting from the brain map

Dr. Laura Hanson: so when you talk about squiggly lines that's more about the raw EEG okay which yes as you get more experience that's what the diplomat earned me is now even looking at the raw EEG you can see the different things that are going on because there are certain phenomenons that go on with your eyes closed and then there is this dance that should be going on with your brain waves when your eyes are open so then they'll take all that data and turn it into reports the reports will give us beautiful colorful pictures of either blues or all the different yellow to red tones and so the blue tones are showing us where the brain is under aroused it doesn't have the full power that it should and there can be many reasons for that so medications can do that and then injury can do that it can be in those red tones where it would indicate that it's over aroused there's too much going on and then there's reports that help us look at the organization of the brain waves brain waves are everywhere but they do have a dominance in certain areas of the brain and so we can actually see that and then you can take this data and you can create the program for the individual to actually do the practice of neurofeedback and

TalkToMeGuy: I want to ask about neurofeedback but I have to ask this first in you've been doing brain maps for many years now that's a question yes okay so when you look at a brain map can you see things I'll call it lighting up do you observe a difference in brain maps with unbalanced nutrition like let's say somebody was on way too much sugar or way too much something or a fair to high toxic load do you see and when I say high toxic load that means environmental biofuels air pollution glyphosate all of that kind of intoxicants in our food like glyphosate can does that show up anywhere in the brain map so

Dr. Laura Hanson: there's lots of roads to so many pieces of what you said so for example if there is high excitotoxicity going on in the brain that's going to trigger the neurotransmitter or the neurotransmitter that's actually creating it is glutamate now that can have an impact on a certain area of the brain doesn't mean it has to be one area over the other you would never take a brain map by itself and make lots of definitive points you would always bridge together the history I call it a blueprint and then your actual assessment of the individual in addition to the brain map but there's other components that the reporting systems break down so one of the areas that's really beginning to help us make those kinds of let's say immune connection is looking at the different networks of the brain and how the brain is actually communicating within that network so we're going to be looking at things like coherence between different regions and so part of the reporting will give me pictures of coherence and that means how what area how is it sharing information with another area ideally it should be well balanced but for example if I were to see like a round head with blue lines and they were very dominant in the front I would say there is less coherence in the front of the brain as compared to the back of the brain and so you would begin to build a picture of what's going on for this individual based on all of those components

TalkToMeGuy: so if you have a child I was going to say this way for later but it just seems to sit so perfectly here because you're looking at brain waves so if you have a child or any child a child that's sort of default device I'll call it I'll say busy device is either a tablet or the parents phone when they're in the car or they want to be occupied do you begin to you've done enough work that I suspect you would possibly see something if you have a child who spends what I will say this is a personal judgment way too much time on a device and I mean that kind of device that's like held in their lap or let alone what it's doing to the cervical region that neck held on their lap or the cell phone or that kind of and I'm not talking about emf I'm just talking about that kind of focus rather than being in the backseat of the car looking out the window

Dr. Laura Hanson: you know I'm so glad that you bring that up and you're absolutely correct it does segue quite nicely because there is actually imaging dense dense tensor imaging abbreviated DTI that has been looking at this and so those coherence factors the communication the shared information what they're actually finding especially because these children are in an open window of development so that means that they are their brains are in the process of being wired they are highly sensitive to what the stimulus is and if that stimulus is these devices they're actually creating more white matter in their brain so we have gray matter and we have white matter gray matter is where you process white matter is how you get that information from front back side side right to left you know forward right back left so it's the white matter that literally is becoming like the trains on the track and so what we're seeing is they have too many tracks too many trains and they can't filter so their brains are just on on on all the time and there's it's so far reaching that they're now we're also focused on what's happening to their eyes and your eyes are the only neuron that is outside of your skull and that information has to go in and then your visual cortex or the information that perceives and processes what the eyes are seeing is in the back of your brain and that's also where they're supposed to be the dominant alpha brain wave and we can break that down if you want to but it's an important brain wave for focused idle or like you know just how you're going to collect neurons to lock in on information and when we're sitting there staring at a device all the time you're now going into fixation of gaze you're holding your eyeballs in a fixed position and children they're sensory seeking little individuals and just like you said they should be looking out the window it's like when when I come into my office even now I'm making sure that I am not sitting here staring at our screen I'm looking at my window I mean my office is like a tree house I have this beautiful green landscape out here and I give my eyes a break and kids I've almost become like a stalker in my community I go around and take pictures of kids when families are at a restaurant nobody's talking to each other everybody's got their face in in a device and now it's the little person in the high chair they've got their own device and we are changing we are literally changing how the brain is working and if you don't mind I'd like to just add you know typing on a device is not hand-eye coordination removing the pen or pencil from a child's hand is also changing the landscape of the brain that pen to paper pencil to paper is a very unique neuron it's called a unipolar neuron you only use it for writing but it's the connection of the written word to the brain and when we don't have this we are lacking the connection and the the maturation of this is now being thought that it's it's causing people not to be able to make decisions and to literally let everybody else make decisions for them and then to I'll close the circle here is that look what happens on these devices you're sitting there talking about well one day it really it really startled me we were talking about the movie hunger games and the next thing you know on everybody's phone we were all getting is somebody hungry out there and it's manipulation and we've got to understand how far reaching this really goes now the difference between the adult using this device compared to a child as an adult you used pen to paper you developed your landscape architect of your brain these children have not they have no other point of reference but what you're giving them right this minute and I really think we have made a huge mistake I know it's here to stay I understand that but I think we're making a huge mistake by putting them in their lives around the clock all the time

TalkToMeGuy: and I think it leads this is a an opinion I'll put a flag up opinion but everybody that listens to me know it's all opinion that I know I've known a lot of tech people I used to be in the way back machine I was a technical writer for a DOS based company and a support agent and so that's in the way that's way way way back that's floppy disks and I see tech people now meaning people that are professional at it and they seem to have a kind of a gaze a slightly disconnected gaze and I think that leads to I've been in tech circles where they're all very articulate when they're either doing their podcast or talking about it or they're trying to theorize an idea of how to make a robot do a certain thing or whatever the whatever they're working on they're very passionate hyper focused when they're doing it but in between their little glassy eyed they don't have that same kind of dynamic of conversational skill as there seems to be I'm not trying to trash talk devices I'm a person who uses devices a lot well a lot pretty much a lot but I just think it's tricky as you say I see I remember the I don't know it struck me at some point I was walking in downtown someplace and I was a summer day and I was walking around and I was watching some young girls who were sitting together on a bench and they were giggling and laughing but they all had their phones out and they were all texting furiously all the time they were talking so mostly they were watching what they were doing and talking and they might be texting each other I don't know but it just blew my mind that it has come to that oh it has yeah I'm a person who speaks into a microphone for a living I'm used to talking with people and so the idea of I'll text you is like no no I'm the person still to this day who annoys my friends when they text me I call them back I know I'm like that too and they're like why are you calling me will you text with me and I don't feel like texting that's why I called you so I just think it's a tricky zone yeah of what it's as you said what it's doing to the light and gray matter but it's also taking away people's ability to communicate in a very way and I think as animals back when we were dragging around to stick to keep the you know dragons in the tyrannous wrecks off of us we like some kind you know we we depend upon sound and nature before the show started we talked I talked about doing a lot of camping as a kid the old camping hiking and you depend upon your ears and you depend upon your senses to be aware of what's going around you at all time and it's a safety thing it's a survival thing on the some core level but I think there's also a part where when you get together with people there's conversation yes and yet there are times sometimes when I'm at an event and like you say you go into a restaurant a nice restaurant and everybody's on their phone I'm thinking I have bad words about that because it's like what why are we all out doing this together and you're all looking at your phones and every time it buzzes you have to pick it up and look at it yep I drive people crazy because I will put my phone down on the table and no matter what it does I'm not picking it up and talking or texting back

Dr. Laura Hanson: and I think that's very important you know the special senses the eyes the ears the taste the touch that is the electrical communication to your brain they've also found that device use is ramping up the left side of your brain more than the right side of your brain and if we just tag on the communication part the right side of the brain is the need to talk the left side is the work of talk so if I ramp up the left I view all conversation as too much work and that's where we get I'll just text I'll just text and we're losing the fluctuation of tone and sometimes even with emails you know people read all kinds of things into them that aren't there because the humanness has been removed so it is it's it's you're right on it it's a very important part of being human and being able to communicate right.

TalkToMeGuy: Mike drop end of show have a great weekend it is it just it really does blow me up but I like to say as I say I'm the person who calls people back and talks into a microphone I mean I am alone in a room however I'm still talking to people on

Dr. Laura Hanson: radio that's why I like my podcast too it gave me a platform to talk to people I totally understand yeah

TalkToMeGuy: yeah I just thought I'd defend the you know I like devices I use them but I'm not you know I use my phone as much for a camera more as a camera than I do as a phone really I'm not a cell phone user that much I'm gonna jump here because I thought this was so interesting what are what are primitive reflexes it makes me think of a monkey dragging its knuckles on the ground what are primitive reflexes and why are they so important to everything that you are trying to rewire and work in the human nervous system

Dr. Laura Hanson: they are so so so so important it's literally how humans get wired so there is a group of reflexes that while you're in your mommy's womb you have to go through in order to be ready to be born so the first set of reflexes are called the withdrawal reflexes and these are very early on before about eight weeks and literally the baby is very defensive and the baby pulls away from anything that comes near it okay so what's the environment the environment is amniotic fluid in the baby so it is ripples it's vibration and the baby is learning on light touch how to pull away from something so this is our first defense system for survival that we would know if something is harmful especially at the lightest level that we would be able to determine do i need to get away from this or not and then these reflexes once they lay down their information they're going to grow up and a grown up withdrawal reflex is like when you're cooking and you skim your arm on a hot pot you don't sit there and go wow my flesh is burning you pull away faster than you can even think that was hard wired into your system when you were in the womb then you make a transition to the primitives and there are many of them but the one that starts the cascade going is called the moro reflex and i'll just highlight that one but it's going to wire three things into our neurology and it is arousal, CO2-02 reflex and the sympathetic nervous system fight or flight so the baby has an arousal centrally generated in that body that when the glucose is used up it is going to wake up every two and a half to three hours as a newborn and feed now there's more to that that the baby wakes up and cries because it's alerting someone pay attention to me and then these things again they're going to grow up so first we are attended to then we learn to attend to ourselves like potty training we take these little guys we put them on little potties they have no idea what you're doing they have pressure on their little pelvis maybe you read a story sing a song all of a sudden they pinkel we get incredibly excited that creates an association response to the child what's going on something i did everybody's very excited through repetition the child begins to make the connection that every time i go in there and i tinkle it's going to be a party and then i can start to feel a little something right before i tinkle and then before you know it the child is able to go to the bathroom on its own and then once i've been attended to and then i attend to myself that's when i can learn to pay attention to someone else wow isn't that incredible when you think about the stats on how many kids are labeled either attention deficit or attention hyperactivity co2 o2 reflex is literally monitoring the balance between oxygen and co2 so if you had too much co2 in you you should have a moro response which is also called the startle it should arouse you and you take a deep breath that's the action that happens with this particular reflex there's always an action there's always a body movement associated to primitive reflexes so if that baby is under aroused it doesn't get that message these are children babies that have actually died from sudden infant death these are survival mechanisms they didn't get the message the brain didn't get the message that there was too much co2 they didn't take a deep breath and then third part is the sympathetic nervous system you're quite a fight so that is a huge component of our autonomic nervous system and you know most people know the term fight a fight but it does so much more you know whenever you take a breath in that's your sympathetic nervous system isn't that interesting how it ties to the action of this reflex when a baby startles it literally keeps the feet from them open to the body and then very very very slowly compacts the left posture that actually is a beginning of quite right variability now if there's that much to one so reflex you can imagine How the whole nervous system has been wired while you were in your mom.

And when you are being born, because of the moral reflect, your sympathetic nervous system will act very soon. It will literally slow everything down. Remember I said remember the word transition. And it allows the baby to go through the transition of birth.

And that should take a little bit of time. The baby is born with perception. It kind of missed out on some of the reflexes finishing their job.

And these are some of the very helpful reasons why children, I like to think of it as dominant. People make this beautiful domino abstract. It's one little book in the whole thing though. So I think of this when I try to explain to people what a domino is being pulled out of the suitcase. And so stop the pattern. The child keeps going, but there's a hiccup. There's something that is not moving forward. And most of the time it is the physical reflex that is stuck, hasn't completed its job, and it needs to integrate. These are also the same things that happen to an adult who has a traumatic brain injury, a heart attack or a stroke. Permit to reflexes are the rudimentary place of all learning. So even the adult would go back into their brainstem, that's what is required to reside. And that's how they begin to retrain their nervous system and bring it forward. And you can't. You can absolutely be pulled. It has an incredibly hard-witting impact.

TalkToMeGuy: And is this part of this to do with the... Again, this is something I heard you talk about, I think here, about the vestibular system. Does this fit into here? Oh, yes. You can try this back here.

Thank you. Talk about the vestibular system. Once you talk about it, I was like, oh, I remember this, but I never remember what vestibular is. But yeah, talk about that.

Dr. Laura Hanson: That's probably my favorite system. And it's really where the dominoes started for me was learning about the vestibular system. All of the primitive reflexes, all of the postural reflexes are connected to the vestibular system. It is believed that the vestibular system is completely mature and myelinated by the time you're born.

So these are three teeny, tiny little canals that are behind your eardrum. And they have, they call it the Cartesian coordinate system. They go in three angles. And so you have an anterior, a posterior, and a horizontal. And the movement, so if I'm talking about the anterior one, so I've got my hand positioned to where my thumb is straight up. My index finger is forward and my middle finger is off to the left.

I'm using my right hand in case you want to kind of follow like that. So if I'm looking at just the anterior canal, that's going to be represented by my index finger. So this is going to interpret movements that go left and right and forwards and backwards. While my thumb is rotation and jumping up and down, my middle finger is flexion and extension and lateral translations. So it's the interpretation of movement. But you, you can understand that for your body in the outside world and the movement that you do. But you also have emotions.

So you feel up, you feel down. You have a very unique physiological movement. Blood travels a certain way. We digest and eliminate a certain way.

An egg and sperm come together in a very unique way. When our movement patterns even internally are not going in the right direction, we call it a pathology. Movement, rather it's inside or out, is coordinated by or perceived.

Let me say it's perceived by the vestibular system, which then sends that information to the brain. It's, it's just, it's like a spirograph. There's just so many connections going on that you can never just like pull one little piece out. But the vestibular system has such a far reaching impact as well as we've been talking about. But it has an autonomic nervous system connection that if you stimulate it for about 20 minutes, you can break the pattern of sympathetic or fight or flight and put that body into a state of the parasympathetics, which is rest, feed, and breed. So it also has an autonomic nervous system, automatic component to how our physiology works.

TalkToMeGuy: And can you say something about this interesting device that seems too big to be a device, your vestibular chair?

Dr. Laura Hanson: Oh, yes. So I have a wonderful one. I call him my earthly dad. His name is Larry. He, he and I met many, many, many years ago and he heard me talking about the vestibular system and he came up to me and says, what do you know about the vestibular system? And I said, well, a lot.

And he goes, well, me too. And we've been connected ever since, but he had the ability to create this shaft that is used for vestibular training. And so it will orientate a 3D motion. And those, those are the things that we want to do like a device is 2D. Your eyes are 3D and our world is 3D. So we want that three dimensional movement. So when I started really getting deep into kids years ago, I would do so much work on the vestibular, on their eyes, on their ears.

And when I met Larry and we could pull our efforts together, it led me to create what I call the triangle of development. So we have an incredible vision of vestibular chair. It's lovely to lay on and it moves. It'll go clockwise.

It'll go counterclockwise, but that shaft allows us to create those angles to give that 3D movement to the body. And then we incorporate an audio piece as well as a visual piece because there's neurological intimacy between the vestibular system. Your eyes and your ears, meaning that they share neurological communication. So if one is off, typically another one's off.

So let's say you experience vertigo, you know, there is a connection to your eyes and then your ears, the vestibular system is in your ears. So that's really easy to see or understand how they share this communication. So we do a program here where a child and adults do it as well. In fact, I just did a piece of research with an adult. You may want me to touch on if you want me to let you know, but we make that as part of our management plan if those are the elements that I find in the assessment.

And that is a 10-hour program, two hours a day, five consecutive days. You're in the dark. There's no, you can't bring a phone in there because I have to have a parent in there because kids will do whatever they want to do. But we have to have, you know, somebody watching the child. The child is in darkness and they've only got what they can see on the tablet that has our visual piece. But we're not doing the fixation of gaze because the chair is moving and the instruction is to keep your eyes on the target. And it's a very non-stimulatory type of connection because what we're trying to do is to bring only attention to those three structures, the vestibular, the eyes, the ears.

And that's intensity and frequency to have you do it for 10 hours over five days so that we can push those three systems to communicate the way they're supposed to.

TalkToMeGuy: I do want to ask you about the adult recent research that you discovered. But before that, I want to say that in the 90s, I was traveling around 90s. I think so. I was traveling around and going to what were called whole life expos, which were really what they, is that what they were?

They were whole life expos. Everybody from water purifiers to incense to devices to all sorts of things. And for a number of years, there was a gentleman traveling around with something called the Graham Potentializer. And it was a flat device that you laid on and then it rotated you up one direction. I mean, literally lifted you up. Oh, yeah.

Okay. And lowered you down in the opposite direction. And he said that he had designed this to replicate the action of a child rolling down a grassy hill. That was the idea he had. Oh, how cool. And it was my favorite thing. Anytime I was at a show, I would find him right away because that meant I'd be out and through unloading the car and setting up the thing and doing all the stuff with my partner. And it was a great thing to like space me out and like settle me back in.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Yeah, that's the vestibular system. It's really cool.

TalkToMeGuy: And you know, go ahead.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, you know, here's the thing is that unfortunately, because we do sit in front of computers a lot, you know, they call sitting the new smoking. We're not moving. We're not moving like we need to. And we've already kind of accepted that as you get older, you're going to fall down, which is something that is completely false.

You don't have to go that way. But like the one thing that I'd ask your audience to ask themselves, if I asked you to go on a roller coaster with me, would you? If that would automatically start to give you some nausea, that's your vestibular system. Just even the thinking of that kind of movement, if it gave you nausea, would tell you that your vestibular system is not interpreting the world well. And that is something you want to work on because if not, that is what could cause you to have a sudden change in what you perceive under your feet and fall down. So it's really good to keep that vestibular system sharp.

TalkToMeGuy: And if I hate roller coasters, how do I do that? And if that is, I get nauseous. It's because I'm just like, no, this is, I'm not having fun.

Dr. Laura Hanson: But why are you not having fun? It just seems terrifying. So the movement does terrify you.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, but it doesn't make me dizzy or make me fall down.

Dr. Laura Hanson: That's okay, but it still creates a fear and fear is part of your autonomic nervous system as well as your brain. And we've already said the autonomic nervous system is also represented inside of that vestibular system. So that's your perception, but it still can be tied back to the vestibular. Keep going on that guy's table. Do you still see that guy?

TalkToMeGuy: No, I don't. Unfortunately, I stopped doing those.

Dr. Laura Hanson: You'll have to come to Atlanta then and get on my chair.

TalkToMeGuy: And I've never...

Dr. Laura Hanson: Or go roll down a hill.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, grassy hill. I know you don't see that much. Wrong time to be here, but soon it'll be green again.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Go ride a bicycle. Like I love riding my bike.

TalkToMeGuy: That's what I'm going to say. Yeah, I think that worked for me for about 15 years. While doing everything else, I was a touring cyclist. That just means out riding around the country. It's a fancy way of doing it.

Yeah, that's great. I'm going for a ride, but it might be 50 to 100 miles. And I would practice.

I would put my... There was something called rollers. And in the winter months, you would take your bike and set it on these rollers. And so that you would then do spinning, this is what it's called, to keep your heart rate and everything going. And you would develop a phenomenal state of balance. Because if you stopped spinning, you'd fall over.

Oh, wow. Or there was no bike rolling you up. You would just put your bike on these two rollers.

Two rollers in the back, two rollers in the front. And there was a rubber band, a giant rubber band that held them. And you would just pedal like bad word. And it would keep you from falling over. But it also developed a phenomenal sense of center. So that when you were out bicycling, it made your bicycling more efficient and less tippy.

Dr. Laura Hanson: You have got to send me either a link or a name of that. I have two bikes on my main floor, but they're just in stationary resistance trainers. And I love what you just said. That would be phenomenal to kind of take it up to another level of challenge for the little cherubs that want to ride the bicycle. Oh, I love that.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, the tricky part is that if you, let's say that you drop your back, not so much the front tire, because the front tire is not attached to the chain, but if you dropped your rear tire off the roller, you would then be going at high speed toward a wall or something. So you'd have to, there would be practice and it could be tricky. I've had most of those mistakes. So that's why I'm like, oh, that was bad.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, I can also see like a crash pad being there. But you know, that's what it is when I'm working with these kids is that the brain will change very, very quickly. And you've got to be quick on your toes to give that next level of challenge. And since the vestibular system is just that powerful, it's always a good place. But I love, I'm going to, I need to look into that. That's really cool.

TalkToMeGuy: I'll see if I, there must still be around now the, what we old cyclists would call the, the whims now take their back tire, front tire out and put it into a fork, meaning a brace device. So you're locked in position. You can't really fall over.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Yeah, that's what I've got. So like, what that's nothing, man. Try roller. No, very exciting.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Yeah, very exciting. That doesn't do everything you were saying for sure. Yeah, it's great.

TalkToMeGuy: And I know we could spend an hour on this just alone, but we only have about 10 ish minutes. But I do want to back into talking to you about ADHD and ADD. And my opening question is, what are your thoughts on how it seems to be like people are trying to normalize this like it's a thing.

Like it's just sort of accepted. Oh yeah, my kid has ADHD or my kid has bubble. Versus saying we should be figuring out why this is an issue. Why so many children are having ADD. That's my opinion.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, I couldn't agree more. And I actually did a four part podcast on this because I don't think, I don't think people really understand how normal it is becoming. And I have certainly heard parents say, well, yeah, of course my kid has ADD. And I really try to spend time helping people understand and educate them. One of the things that the way I would start this is I don't know how many people realize, but that diagnosis is actually under a mental disorder classification.

And when you go down that path, you are giving your child a diagnosis of a mental disorder that will now follow them. And so as myself, I'm a licensed doctor. I have to do malpractice insurance. I have to sign a document and they ask me that question. Do you have you had any mental disorder diagnoses?

Are you on any psychotropic drugs? So if your child is diagnosed with that, that is what they would look at for as long as that diagnosis is in place. If they wanted to become a pilot, if they wanted to become a doctor, that diagnosis would follow them. And I find it very upsetting that one, we would go in this direction when there is a very known developmental sequence that is behind the ability to pay attention as we were discussing with the moro reflex and the ability for the brain to basically turn on. That's what arousal means. But with a child, they've got to first be attended to, then learn how to attend to self, to then be able to attend to others.

And then again, you have to look at the whole blueprint and say, okay, what else is going on? We've got kids that they don't eat breakfast. Or they have lots of pancakes and bagels, first thing in the morning. And so if you have no glucose in your brain, by 9 o'clock, 9.30, you're out. You cannot pay attention if you don't have enough glucose. Your eyes.

We've been talking a lot about how the eyeballs work and if you have this asymmetry of function and how the eye literally can look at something. You're going to be getting different pieces of information. And before you know it, you're going to feel frustrated and you're not going to be able to pay attention. There are so many reasons why attention could be disrupted. But there's so many other components to yielding a diagnosis.

Schools, they get a certain amount of money for every kid that is diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder. And it's not just a tension deficit. It's dyslexia. It's oppositional defiance disorder.

It's kind of lost it there for a second. But having some kind of behavioral issue, the teachers begin to then recommend you need to put your kid on medication. And here's the other part of that is once we start putting psychotropic drugs into a child that's still in an open window of development, just like the tablet, you are taking that prescription medication and it is going to influence how the synapse of neurons are going to communicate. So let's say we're going to use stimulant medication. You're going to change that chemical cycle all the way down at the synapse. Unfortunately, what we have found and research has found is that even when you come off these medications, the synapse isn't coming back on like it was supposed to. So now we have tons of people in their late 20s and 30s that are really having trouble with memory. And that's the outcome of synaptic changes. And now last year, the CDC changed all the developmental milestones. They have said instead of 12 months of walking, that's okay if you don't do it until you're 18. 24 months was a pivotal one for word recognition.

Now they've pushed that to 30. They took crawling out. Crawling is the pivotal time when both sides of your brain begin to talk to each other.

We are absolutely normalizing delay. And the typical, the number one issue that typically gets impacted when a child domino sequence has come out of order is their ability to pay attention. And it can go over aroused or under aroused. And that you can pick up beautifully on a brain map if that was the only piece that I was looking at.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. And why? This is a whole show. Why did they do that? What's the motivation? Is there a justification, a rationale?

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, I'll tell you. I did a podcast on this and I really looked at the history of it. And it's very alarming. So we have to go back to like the 50s and 60s. Back then psychotherapists were really considered top dogs. And then they started to apparently get a little too deep with their thought process. And then everybody kind of pushed them away. And back then that really changed the industry that we would think of for getting a psycho evaluation.

And that group was really deteriorating. Now, let me be fair. In chiropractic, the American Medical Association wanted to pull chiropractors into that arena 100 years ago. And chiropractors said, no, we wanted to stay a separate and distinct profession.

Now, that doesn't mean it's been great because it is very difficult. However, the group of people that are under the ability to do psychiatry, things of that nature, they are part of the Medical Association. So in order to help them continue to move forward, they gave them the arena of the diagnoses of ADD, dyslexia, OCD, ODD, all of those because every single one of those fall under autism, asperger, all of it falls under a mental disorder. That's why it's classified as a mental disorder. Then you can go deeper and look at the DSM, that's the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. That is basically the medical Bible where all the diagnoses, all of the diagnoses are outlined, told you more, and what is an acceptable treatment. And there's lots of argument, everybody wants to shoot their alimony, separate and distinct, with then, even the medical group. That's the example that I can give

Speaker 1: that we just got with the vanquish bar.

Dr. Laura Hanson: There's this diagnosis of Candida. This is pediatric autoimmune, more like that, just by a single. About 10 years ago, it was thought to be caused by strep, and now they know it is caused by strep.

However, when they tried to really get this into the DSM, there was an argument with the neurologist and the psychiatrist, because in the Panda's diagnosis, one of the symptoms is a motor tick. Now, strep is a bacterial infection. So the neurologist said there's no way that a bacteria is causing a motor tick. And then another part of that diagnosis is the psychiatric part where there are some obsessive types of behaviors that go on following a strep infection that puts these kids into this category. Well, the psychiatrist said there's no way that a bacteria is going to cause obsessive behaviors.

So it's like nobody can agree. And this is the unfortunate part, because this is what takes the patient out of the middle, and nobody can be okay with, okay, this chiropractor with all these different credentials. She could offer this towards the development, and the functional optometrist could offer this support for the ocular motor. And this functional medicine person could really work on trying to get the strep under control, and then even look back to somebody like me, because I do a lot of nutrition. I'm going to work on getting the immune system regulated.

We've all got amazing insight and perspectives, and if we would work collectively, I think we would see a huge shift. But that's not our healthcare system. And then on top of it, the insurance companies are running the process in which you get care. If that's not in the DSM, there's no way the insurance company is going to pay for you. And people have to pay huge chunks every month to get insurance. And if you can't think outside of that box and realize you're going to have to come out of pocket with some stuff, some people can and some people can't. I just think our healthcare system in the United States could really use an overhaul.

TalkToMeGuy: I got nothing. I agree completely. I've known people who've been through the healthcare system, and it's just astonishing to me how they get pain-porned. You see a specialist, you see another specialist, you see a third specialist. They all think you should be on something different or do something different. But there's no conversation between them. No. Wow.

Couldn't we do a conference call and talk about this? It's mind-blowing. I hate to say it, but I'll jump up and this is again now my opinion that it's not really a healthcare system. It's a sick care system.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, I... That's a fact of affairs. It really is. And I'm with you. And I say that to try to be respectful. I am really not trying to squash medicine.

I know some great medical providers. I know a lot of people moving more into a functional arena, but we are in a crisis and we continue to go in this direction. And the population today that is really getting a huge kick is our children. And what we are doing to them, honestly, in 10, 15 years, I don't know who will be around to actually run the country. Yeah. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And I will say I'll counter that, not really counter, but I will observe that in the 10 years that I've been doing this show that it is very exciting when I see somebody... I'll use him as an example. William Davis, MD, cardiologist. First, he wrote a book about wheat and the evils of wheat and how bad it is and why it's bad. And then since then, now maybe seven or eight years later, I've interviewed him about all these things. He wrote about probiotics and gut health and actually making your own yogurt to improve microbiome and having benefits and getting SIBO back in line and doing a bunch of things.

So he's way out of the MD world, but I am interviewing a lot of MDs who have become functional medicine practitioners. So I think that I see a glimmer of a ray of hope. Yes, absolutely. But it's gnarly to use a technical term. It's gnarly. It's a mess currently. So I'm with you. I don't know what's going to... Well, yeah, that's a whole other thing. What's going to happen when we have people who are supposed to be running the country, but they're too busy texting? What? All right.

Dr. Laura Hanson: This has been... I think the biggest culprit is the insurance. And I would really encourage people to look differently. It's not a credit card. It's insurance. And I would stay more on the catastrophic side for insurance and I would create a more of a health account where you're also contributing to yourself financial resources. So if you do need something or do need something now that you begin to have the resources because there's wonderful things out there that can bring us all back to true health.

TalkToMeGuy: I agree completely. And now I'm surprised that we're already minutes over. I was going to ask another question, but I'm going to control myself, which is hard. But we're going to do another part. Okay. Where can people... Can people work with you remotely? Where can people find out more about your work? And I'll put all these links into the show notes. Great.

Dr. Laura Hanson: Well, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and the website is called ConnectMyBrain.com. There are podcasts. I'm on Spotify and Apple. That's also called Connect My Brain. There is also an eSchool. And yes, I do work remotely as well. And I'm actually really building this part. And so this has always been in the back of my mind. And what I'm trying to do is to really bring together an app and a membership for parents, one for parents and one for professionals that can really bring some solid information your way as well as services. So check out our website.

There is a Contact Us page. And feel free to reach out with any of your questions. If you want to get on the phone and chat, tell me when you're available. That's the hardest part when I get contact forms.

I don't know when I can get in touch with you. And sometimes we end up going back and forth. But I love bringing information and hope to people. So thank you so much for letting me be on your show today. I really enjoyed it. And I hope we were able to bring some pearls to your audience.

TalkToMeGuy: I believe so. By the chat, I have a chat room that I'm running concurrently. And they're all like, wow. So that's always a good sign.

Dr. Laura Hanson: I like that. Oh, that's great. I'm glad that makes me happy.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you so much, Dr. Laura. That was fun and great. I had a great time. You had a good time. Those are the important parts. Great. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of the weekend. And we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you.